The Generic Person: Personalization in Digital Culture, Healthcare and Data Science (Bloomsbury Studies in Digital Cultures)

We ask who-or what, and how-is the person of personalisation.Exploring practices across the domains of digital culture, healthcare and data science, this open-access book argues that they re-articulate relations between economy, politics and culture. Contemporary investment in big data, increasing computational power and ‘real-time’ analytics have made participation in a culture of personalisation almost impossible to avoid.We must declare, measure and share our personal data in order to carry out many activities. ‘People Like You’ are simultaneously one and many: a group, a category, or a generic emerging from the mapping of publics onto populations. Focusing in-depth on case studies in digital culture, health care and data science, this book identifies common features of personalising practices to evaluate their significance for conceptions of the person.We explore three features: the use of tracking techniques; the formation of relations of likeness, resemblance or similarity on the